Anthems for a New Generation

A songbook of progressive/protest music for the twenty-first century. Dozens of anthems from 1970 to the present, from around the world, all with an essential "hook" that makes them ideal for progressive mobilizations and celebrations.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

It's a funny thing, the iconic reach of this song. Written by Scorpions vocalist Klaus Meine, it's one of the premier power ballads of all time -- one of the few globally successful ones sung by a continental European band. You're as likely to hear its whistled opening refrain in Argentina as in Uzbekistan, in St. Petersburg as in Johannesburg.

"Wind of Change" is remembered as the theme song of arguably the last great political-cultural moment in world politics -- the collapse of communism in Central Europe and the former USSR in 1989-90. It was indeed inspired by those events: Scorpions played in Moscow in 1989, at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign of glasnost (openness). But the song wasn't released until November 1990, and didn't become an international hit until well into 1991. It went on to be voted "Song of the Century" in a German ZDF network poll. As I say, you hear it damn near everywhere.

Adorable and just a little kitsch, "Wind of Change" draws its central motif not from Central Europe, but from Africa. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, addressing a recalcitrantly racist parliament in South Africa in February 1960, declared that a "wind of change" was sweeping the African continent -- one of national liberation and political independence. (His speech ever since has been remembered as the "Winds of Change" speech, but it was WIND, and Scorpions got it right.)

The direct references in "Wind of Change", however, are not to Africa but to post-Soviet Russia -- as the video (below) also makes clear. The Moskva river and Gorky Park are mentioned at the outset, establishing an ambience of intoxicated emancipation that carries through the anthemic and only slightly cringe-inducing chorus ("the magic of the moment / On a glory night ..."):

Saturday, August 25, 2012

I made a point of being in Africa during the entire 2010 World Cup -- mostly in Ghana, whose team was the only African one that ended up doing much in the tournament, advancing to within a struck crossbar of the semi-finals. The official song for the 2010 tournament was Shakira's "Waka Waka: This Time for Africa", which was promoted at every opportunity.

It was striking to observe, however -- as I traveled in cramped minibuses around Ghana and Burkina Faso and Benin -- that while the reaction to Shakira's tune was tepid at best, whenever the Coca-Cola-sponsored "Celebration Mix" of "Wavin' Flag", by the Somali-Canadian singer K'naan, came over the radio, a great many people started grooving to it and singing along, like something out of a goddam Coca-Cola advertisement.

This "Celebration Mix" ruled the world in the summer of 2010, hitting the top 10 in no fewer than 19 countries, and establishing itself as a bona fide anthem:

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Nick Lowe wrote "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," and released it on a 1974 album by his band Brinsley Schwarz. Elvis Costello and his lethal band The Attractions recorded it as the B-side of a now-forgotten Lowe single (which Lowe produced but did not play on). Its popularity led to its drafting in the US as the final track on Costello's incendiary 1979 album, Armed Forces, where it replaced "Sunday's Best," which was apparently deemed insufficiently epic. The Armed Forces shuffle over time established the song as a bona fide New Wave anthem.

Power-pop of this kind, including Lowe's and Costello's variants, often had a posy feel to it, and "(What's So Funny ...)" comes across as a kind of postmodern protest song, a posture captured perfectly in its title -- defensive, self-absorbed, yet also gloriously defiant. "I believe that Nick wrote the song as an affectionate parody of various pious '60s peace anthems," Costello recalled in the liner notes to the Rykodisc reissue of Armed Forces.

The lyrics also have a premodern quality, though -- "this wicked world," "is all hope gone," "the strong and ... the trusting," "downhearted ... spirit" -- and their structure is as simple and sturdy as an Elizabethan folk ballad:

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

For what proved to be a brief cultural moment in the late 1980s, Tracy Chapman held center-stage in the global pop landscape. Her eponymous debut album (1988) was a multimillion-selling sensation. Her distinctive voice and progressive persona vaulted her to the forefront of projects like the groundbreaking Human Rights Now tour for Amnesty International, where Chapman shared a global stage with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Youssou N'Dour.

Though she has continued to release albums and perform internationally, Chapman perhaps never went on to attain true folk-pop diva status. For radio purposes, her legacy rests heavily on two songs, "Fast Car" and "Talkin' Bout a Revolution". But while that is far too limiting, it should be recognized that both songs still sound fresh and inspired.

"Revolution", in particular, is a richly melodic song driven by a vigorous groove once the rhythm section kicks in. It calls on popular forces to be sensitive to those moments when "finally the tables are starting to turn," even if at first "it sounds like a whisper." The lyrics have a pristine and timeless quality worthy of Woody Guthrie:

I well remember the shock -- both gleeful and guilty -- that I felt upon hearing Bruce Cockburn's "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" back in 1984. An iconic Canadian folk singer, Cockburn was known as an intellectual poetic stylist and a Christian humanist and pacifist. Kind of a thinking person's Gordon Lightfoot. The pugnacious tone of "If I Had ...", and the blunt lyrics -- especially that final line, surely one of the great stings-in-the-tail in rock -- produced excitement and unease alike.

Many progressives could identify -- especially those of us who had slogged in the activist trenches of the movement against Yankee intervention in Central America -- with a desire to see real harm done to the perpetrators of the mass crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Elsewhere on his classic album Stealing Fire, Cockburn would pay eloquent tribute to the people of "Nicaragua" in their struggle against Contra terrorists and the US superpower.

"If I Had a Rocket Launcher", with its darkly ironic updating of Pete Seeger's '60s anthem "If I Had a Hammer", was born from a different theater of the Central American wars in the early 1980s: Guatemala, where popular, mostly indigenous forces were under attack by a genocidal government and army. The campaign of mass atrocity was at its peak just as Cockburn prepared his indictment. As bombs rained done and helicopter gunships roamed, who with an ounce of empathy for terrorized populations would not have wished for a rocket-launcher, to bring down those aloof and tormenting symbols of state violence?

Adam Jones, Ph.D.

We need new anthems. "We Shall Overcome" and "If I Had a Hammer" and "Give Peace a Chance" all had their moment, but they now sound dated and even clichéd. This blog proposes a new songbook (see list below) -- with selections from 1970 to the present -- for the activists of the twenty-first century. To qualify as anthems, these tracks must (a) be broadly positive/ progressive in content; (b) have an essential and substantial "hook" (a line, a verse, a chorus) that could realistically be sung by many progressive people at once, whether for protest or celebration; (c) reflect the ever more globalized world of activism, which means I'm always on the lookout for diverse materials from the Global South; and (d) be appealing to me personally, or why would I be doing this? I'll be blogging over fifty of my own proposals, and I welcome suggestions for further entries. You can share your comments at the end of each entry, and email me with your feedback. Please also let me know if you find any broken links. Now -- let's raise our voices! Adam

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